Conscious Choice: Eating Well with Others

July 2008 | From the Editor

Eating Well with Others

By Ritzy Ryciak

We ate radish and bamboo shoot salad with Dungeness crab and white sturgeon caviar dressing; baked halibut with a morel farro risotto followed by a red beet and green sage sorbet palate cleanser — and those were only two of the five courses served.

While wrapping up this month’s food issue, I had the opportunity to attend a “Farmer’s Dinner” hosted by chef Thierry Rautureau, owner of Rover’s, one of Seattle’s most exquisite and celebrated French restaurants. The dinner was a fundraiser for the recently released documentary, Good Food made by local filmmakers, Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin. The husband and wife team, along with many of the local farmers featured in the film, attended the event and spoke about the movie and organic farming in the Northwest.

The night was a model example of why so many of us have been completely swept away by the local food movement. It is hard to argue with chemical-free food that has been grown by people who truly give a damn. Hand those ingredients over to a renowned and magical French chef, and the results are irresistible. Food and flavors aside (and I promise to come back to those) some of the evening’s most notable highlights happened between courses, when the farmers who provided the ingredients for the artfully crafted and dee-licious dishes stood up and spoke. It felt so right to see our food producers celebrated in the same rockstar fashion chefs have been enjoying for ages.

As we scraped our plates clean (and I am not exaggerating), the folks who grew and gathered stood up and reported back from the field. Anne Schwartz from Blue Heron Farm (Rockport) spoke about how formerly obscure bamboo, which she has grown for years, is growing in edible popularity. Sam Lucy from Blue Bird Grain Farm (Upper Methow Valley) introduced farro, an ancient grain (high in protein and fiber) and one of the world’s first domesticated crops. George Vojkovich, his wife Eiko and their daughter Nicole described the sense of utter satisfaction from running their Skagit River Ranch (Sedro Woolley) and Jania, wife of fisherman Gene Panida, of Wilson Fish (Seattle) thanked everyone for appreciating the “art” of troll-caught fishing her family provides. Clayton Burrows of Alm Hill Gardens (Everson) was up and down in a flash, humbled and awed by the dinner. Finally, Chef Thierry (fedora hat and all) concluded the festivities with heartfelt thanks, making all attendees feel welcome, warm and part of a culinary family.

Back at the tables, each of us savored every morsel on our plate and simply relaxed into our meal. Discussions jumped from farmed salmon and tuna filled with mercury to living off the land to five foods you could not live without if stranded on a desert island (apples are first on my list) all the way to love, anniversaries and astrology.

In the end, the evening was a perfect snapshot of why, what and how we eat truly does have the capacity to change the world — our land, the water and how we relate to one another.

Here’s to gathering ingredients close to home and eating with others often.

—Ritzy

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